3dfx
quietly stole the limelight once again at this year’s fall Comdex in Las Vegas.
From the wax museum in the Venetian, 3dfx announced the first implementation
of the Voodoo Scalable Architecture with the VSA-100. We all expected a fill
rate monster out of 3dfx and the products they announced based on the VSA-100
managed to fulfill every last one of our expectations.

The VSA-100, as you can
probably already gather, is the basis for quite a few products. Much like the
Voodoo3 was the core behind the Voodoo3 graphics cards, the VSA-100 is the heart
and soul of 3dfx’s newly announced Voodoo4 and Voodoo5 products. Let’s first
start with the VSA-100 specifications:

The VSA-100 will operate
at somewhere between 333 and 367 megapixels/s, putting the actual clock speed
at somewhere in the 166MHz to 183MHz range while rendering two pixels per clock.
If you recall, this is essentially a Voodoo3 3000 or a 3500.

The VSA-100 adds support
for 32-bit color rendering, 32-bit textures, 32/24-bit Z & W, and an 8-bit
stencil buffer. Furthermore, the VSA-100 can also render two single-textured
pixels per clock or one dual-textured pixel per clock. Support for 2K x 2K textures
has now been implemented into the VSA-100, thus the VSA-100 offers essentially
everything the Voodoo3 lacked and was criticized for tremendously.

The chip is an AGP 4X part,
with support for AGP 2X, AGP 1X and PCI operating modes. In spite of this the
VSA-100 does not support AGP texturing. 3dfx still feels that AGP texturing
is not truly beneficial and thus there is no reason to pursue support for it
with their products. The chip itself is composed of 14 million transistors,
a little more than half the count of the GeForce, and is manufactured on an
enhanced 0.25-micron, 6-layer metal process. The "enhanced" 0.25-micron
process just means that it takes advantage of shorter gate lengths, which allow
for faster switching thus allowing for higher frequencies and greater yields
at those frequencies. According to 3dfx, the 0.18-micron process is not a mature
one and thus they felt that they would achieve higher yields on a more mature
0.25-micron process. For reference purposes, the only true 0.18-micron
graphics chip available is the mobile Savage MX from S3, with the Savage 2000
being a hybrid 0.18/0.22-micron solution.

The VSA-100 supports all
T-Buffer effects, Full Screen Antialiasing, FXT1/DXTC texture compression and
all of the other features 3dfx has been talking about for the past few months.
For more information on those technologies read our coverage of them here.

The VSA-100 supports anywhere
from 4MB to 64MB of memory per chip, whose clock is synchronized with the core
clock, just like the Voodoo3. The memory bus is 128-bits wide and will offer
anywhere between 2.7GB/s and 2.9GB/s worth of memory bandwidth depending on
the final clock speed of the chip. The excellent 350MHz RAMDAC of the Voodoo3
is carried over to the VSA-100.

From the above description
the VSA-100 doesn’t appear to be much more than a Voodoo3 with support for a
few new visual features and 32-bit color rendering support, but the chip’s support
for up to 32-way SLI scalability (hence the name Voodoo Scalable Architecture)
is what truly defines it and sets it apart from the Voodoo3.